Ok, so I've looked at the problems with the jukebox computer over the last few days.

Problems:Jukebox freezes when trying to do more than one thing at onceJukebox randomly locks upNo music from the external drive

InvestigationJukebox machine seems to be flicking through detecting and not detecting the power supply/battery. This is driving hald (Hardware Abstraction Layer Daemon) wild, and making the CPU a bit mental. We might be able to fix this by either taking the battery out or turning off power-detection.

The CPU is running very hot and has possibly suffered some heat damage. This is probably due to being shut in a cupboard and running all day with little/no ventilation.

The jukebox machine seems to be running a lot of unnecessary processes, which isn't a problem as such, but will slow it down a bit.

The external hard drive appears to have mechanical failure. It's making lots of nice clicky noises when spinning. Techy bit: It appears to have lost all the FAT tables. I managed to mount it using my laptop but ls showed nothing (but froze the terminal up for 10 minutes). I ran fsck.vfat but it fell over with an unexpected number of sectors (Got 483328 bytes instead of 30517052 at 16384). I don't know if there's much we can do about this, as it might be related to the nasty sound the drive is making (disk head issues?). I'm told we have a warranty on this so I think the best bet is to return it for repair/replacement. Chombee?

Having run a few more tests/attempts on the external since the earlier post, I'm pretty sure it's completely hosed and that the data on it is non-recoverable other than via a surface scan of the physical disk.

I have PMmed chombee about the external drive since he doesn't seem to have been active on the bb for a while.

As for the jukebox machine, I think I have a few optimisation tricks to help the freezing issues. I have already set up Prelinking and today I will go through and try and remove as much clutter/unused packages as possible, as well as give the filesystem a good FSCKing.

I did wonder if upgrading to 8.10 on the jukebox might be a good idea? It is running low on RAM and 8.10 cut my RAM usage by nearly 700mb. Are there any objections to this?

There still is, but it's not very big and also people tend to move stuff to/from it when playing CDs through the DVD player.

Of course, there's little we can do with ripping stuff until we get a new external anyway. I managed to speak to chombee the other day and he is going to look for the receipt and give me a call, so hopefully we will have a new drive soon.

Good work on this, the jukebox is hugely important to the experience of being in the cafe.Do you think there are any physical changes that can be made to the layout of the cupboard to make things tidier and easier to use?

There's some confusion about who's going to order a new hard drive, me or Mike? Sounds like Nix has been intermittently asking each of us to do it. Mike, can we clear this up? Let me know if you're still planning to order one this week or if you want me to do it.

There's also the laptop lock. We definitely need to buy a new padlock for it so we can have more than one key. We may need to buy a new lock for it, when I looked on Saturday part of the lock seemed to be missing so I couldn't lock the laptop. That's why I put the padlock on the cupboard door instead. Unless anyone says otherwise I'm gonna buy a new lock for the laptop some time this week so we can lock it again without having to lock the entire cupboard and we can have more than one copy of the key.

I did start looking for drives also. My tactic was to look for something 250GB or bigger that has a 5-year manufacturer's warranty. This I think is as long as the warranties go. I just figure that if the manufacturer gives it a 5-year rather than a 1 or 2, that says something about how long-lasting they think their drive is. A security lock port would also be good.

I got as far as this Western Digital My Passport Elite. It has the 5-year warranty, no lock port, and it looks all fancy and stylish which makes me think it might be more expensive than it needs to be. You can probably do better. One of those ought to be good enough though.

0 x

I've had it with you. If I had an image of a laser gun I would absolutely position it right here in my hand...Ha! I have a real laser absolutely positioned in my hand!

So who has the DVD backup of the music right now? If you can get it to me I'll copy it all onto the new hard drive before I bring it in to the forest. Also if you have any other music you'd like me to put on it, get it to me. PM me.

0 x

I've had it with you. If I had an image of a laser gun I would absolutely position it right here in my hand...Ha! I have a real laser absolutely positioned in my hand!

I've got it. It's safely stored in my flat so it doesn't get lost. I'm happy to copy it all over when the drive is back but if you want to do ti beforehand, let me know when you'll be in Forest and I'll bring it in with me.

The drive is on the way. When I bring the drive in, probably this weekend, I'll sort out the lock also. Then I'll post to the bb and Mike and Ryan can come in to the forest and copy their music onto the new drive.

0 x

I've had it with you. If I had an image of a laser gun I would absolutely position it right here in my hand...Ha! I have a real laser absolutely positioned in my hand!

My only worry is that the hard drive says USB 2.0 and the forest laptop is probably USB 1 and that might be why it doesn't work. My laptop at home is USB 1 too, as are all the machines in my office, the only USB 2 I have is my one laptop per child, I hooked it up to that and the lights still didn't come on. It's not powered by USB, so I think it should at least light up even with USB 1, so I'm assuming it's bricked which means it has to be posted back to seagate at our expense.

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I've had it with you. If I had an image of a laser gun I would absolutely position it right here in my hand...Ha! I have a real laser absolutely positioned in my hand!

Yeah that's what I thought, but I just thought that the drive's auto on/off as your computer goes on/off feature might be some USB 2 thing. It's not though, I tried it on my friends computer that has USB 2 and it still didn't turn on.

It's on its way back to dabs now, I should get a replacement from them next week.

0 x

I've had it with you. If I had an image of a laser gun I would absolutely position it right here in my hand...Ha! I have a real laser absolutely positioned in my hand!

The replacement for the replacement hard drive arrived today, and it works.

Erik who has the most recent backup of the forest's music (July 2008) got in touch with me, he is very busy but if I can bring the hard drive to him on a weekend he can put the music on it. So I will do that and then bring the hard drive into the forest and people can add further music to it.

ETA: this weekend, maybe.

0 x

I've had it with you. If I had an image of a laser gun I would absolutely position it right here in my hand...Ha! I have a real laser absolutely positioned in my hand!